Best of Technical Support

I am trying to install Red Hat onto my Dell laptop using the
partition I created for it. The install runs successfully, but when
I try to load Linux it hangs up after these messages:

checking root filesystem
/ was not cleanly unmounted, check forced
Setting filetype for entry log in /dev (174593) to 6
Unattached inode 82384
UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; run fsck MANUALLY
(ie without -a or -p options)
An error occured during the filesystem check
Dropping you to a shell; the system will reboot
Give root password for maintenance

—Brian Weigner, brian.weigner@colorado.edu

Seems your Linux root filesystem was corrupted somehow. You
actually need to get into single-user mode by issuing a
linux s command at the LILO prompt
and wait until you get the # root prompt. Type:

e2fsck -r /dev/your-root-disk-device

This will go through the device and ask you what to
do with each error it finds. This will probably ask many questions
that should be answered. To properly answer all of them, some Linux
filesystem experience is a must. This is risky business on a real
production system. For now, since it is a fresh install and to make
it easy, answer yes to all the FIX?, and REPAIR? and REMOVE
unused/dirty stuff, questions. After you are done, try rebooting
your system. If that doesn't work, maybe your best bet is to
carefuly reinstall. —Felipe E. Barousse Boué,
fbarousse@piensa.com

To prevent this from happening in the future, run
shutdown -h now (as root) before you power
down. —Don Marti, dmarti@linuxjournal.com

FTP Users Go Ape! Virtual Hosts Fail!

My FTP users are able to back past their home directory and
go right to /. They are using leach FTP, and it allows them to go
up levels even in their home directory.

Also, I have 20 virtual sites (by name, not IP) running on my
Apache server. A couple of times when adding a new virtual host, it
would not resolve until I moved it to the top of the list of
virtual hosts in httpd.conf. Am I out of virtual servers? The
computer is an AMD K6 200MHz with 64MB of RAM. —Aaron,
aaron@x56.net

There is a hack in wuftpd to
prevent users from cd-ing up, but you are probably better off
installing proftpd if you aren't using that yet. It supports
chrooting users in their home directory or some other preset
directory. See:
http://www.proftpd.net/. —Marc
Merlin, marc_bts@valinux.com

You're not out of virtual hosts, but this configuration can
be tricky. Here are some things to check. Do any of the ServerName
or ServerAlias values in the virtual hosts before the broken one
match the broken one's name? If you have a ServerAlias
*.example.com and add warez.example.com, it won't work. Keep
everything with a * alias at the end. Do an
nslookup to make sure that the DNS
for all the virtual hosts works. Make sure that the NameVirtualHost
directive is before the corresponding VirtualHost sections. Read
httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/vhosts/details.html
and, of course, every webmaster's most-read and least-enjoyed
reading material, error_log. —Don Marti,
dmarti@linuxjournal.com

I Have No Dialtone, and I Must Dial

I have a PCTEL internal modem, and I got the drivers from
linmodems.org and have installed them. The problem is the modem
keeps on dialing with the message NO DIALTONE. I was able to
connect only once and that was after trying for a long time. Also,
the transfer rate wasn't what I was expecting. —Krishna,
as_krishna@hotmail.com

Try to see if adding X1 in your AT init string makes a
difference. —Marc Merlin, marc_bts@valinux.com

Spammers Fishing for Addresses

Increasingly, I see spammers attempting to send mail to my
domains by simply trying a series of common first names (i.e.,
david@example.com, bill@example.com, mike@example.com, etc.) Is
there any automated method of shutting down the connection after X
failed addresses and, even better, adding their IP to sendmail's
access database? —Waldo Jaquith, waldo@waldo.net

You could write a small Perl script that parses the reject
log, adds the IP to a blacklist and restarts sendmail when this
happens. —Marc Merlin, marc_bts@valinux.com

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